“Ain’t you something?” Mina said. “Ain’t you a sight?” She didn’t laugh, but turned away and disappeared again.
Grasping the post, he pulled himself shakily upright and shook his head hard, trying to clear it. He staggered to the rocking chair and folded into it and began to drink again. That was Mina’s way, that was always her way: she simply appeared and disappeared when she liked, everything was always under her control. He remembered that only a few weeks ago he had day-dreamed that when she had finished the life of his body she would have it discarded—dumped—in the fields under the brutal sun. Naked to the corrupting heat…Now he realized that he wouldn’t be so lucky. That fate had been reserved for his wife’s white body; Sheila, whom he had murdered, lay out there somewhere, going to pulp in the southern weather. Trying to turn the thought away, he turned his head, shook it hard again. He didn’t have to guess about Sheila; Mina had told him what she had had done, repeated it again and again. Of course.…Mina would always do exactly as she pleased. Coming and going, her movements admitted of no prediction, except that she would continually find him in the moments of his worst shame. Now he had guessed that this was her motive in keeping him, to observe how far downward he had gone. He had become a queer experimental animal; Mina used him purposely to try to gauge through him the fiber of the whole species. And he too felt a chilly detached curiosity. How far into this rushing darkness could a man go? When he had devoured his heart, what was there to push the machine along? At what point was this machine no longer recognizable as himself? He glimpsed a blurred moment of illumination: at that bodiless point—whenever, wherever it was—that the humanity in him melted, disappeared, the universe rested. At least one universe, the humane one. In this momentary half-vision (which he could hardly believe he had been granted) he felt obscurely the presence of other systems, other universes, to which humanity—his humanity—was irrelevant. Mocking crowded points of corruscation. Infinite coldness. He shook his head for the third time and drank again, feeling gratefully the flush of the liquor leap upward in his body from his belly.
THREE
They were traveling. They had loaded Peter into the back seat with the same uncaring gesture they had loaded whatever it was Mina was carrying into the trunk of the car. He sat numb while they made the final preparations, overwhelmed by the all-too-familiar look and odor of the machine. It was his car, of course; Mina had taken possession of everything that had once belonged to him and Sheila. No question about her purposes with his possessions; she would waste them totally and carefully. He observed the scratchy ribbed felt overhead, the frayed latticework of the seat covers. Wouldn’t it be funny if the dome light worked, now that Mina had the car? It had never once worked when the car was his. He wondered if the little leather-bound copy of the Gospel of St. John was still in the glove compartment; surely Mina would have no use for that. He was still slightly drunk; he sat carefully steady and kept his hands clasped between his knees.
They were simply leaving, no goodbyes. Neither Morgan nor his wife—who was almost never seen in the house—came out to speak or to wave. She and Coke Rymer finished what business they had inside the house (without doubt she bore Coke Rymer, too, desperate down into the rancid quilts) and got into the car. He drove and she sat listlessly, her bare arm stretched along the top of the front seat. She glanced about with a placid curiosity. Peter had none; sat stolid, feeling the pour of warm air on him, heaviness of the moving landscape. Behind the car the reddish-yellow dust rose solid as wood and then dispersed to separate particles. Peter looked behind once to see the tenant cabin tossing, as if swimming away in the yellow haze.
They passed the big brick house, the house of the murder, and Peter turned his head. There, it had loomed before him suddenly round a sharp curve of the road and stood shocking in the glacis of the hill. He turned his head. Even the single glimpse of it disturbed, served to force into his gullet the sour taste of the guilt he had been so long now trying to swallow and to keep down. No specific memory—nothing so acutely defined—but a shapeless huge nausea overwhelmed his nerves, and he kept his head turned. He simply would not remember, he denied it all.
On this road it was farmland all the way. On a board fence bordering the roadway, a large gaudy metallic-looking rooster flapped wings and crowed, too late in the day. The racking crow sounded mechanical. Through the bottom fields the creek wandered, not appearing very different from where it ran by Morgan’s cabin. Sunlight burning in ovules on the glassy leaves of poison oak. Two white butterflies involved in hectic acrobatics. The passing in and out of the shadows dropped by massy oaks. Splotched cattle on the splotched hills. Barbed-wire fences, the weathered posts leaning awry, sagging rusty wire. Hot gray roofs of squat chicken houses. Barns red and gray, looking fat and hollow at the same time. The neat white houses and the battered tenant cabins, each garnished on one side with lines of hung washing, spectacular in the breeze. Noise of flung gravel, of wind.
And then they hit pavement and Coke Rymer drove faster. The wind that poured in on Peter cooled and increased in volume. Coke was intent on his driving; he drove savagely but with a flashy accuracy, carefully watching the road before him, though he never seemed to look into his rear-view mirror. Nor did Mina glance into the back seat at Peter. Now and again she would draw her fingers slowly along the top of the front seat; she was caught up in her own listless thoughts, and even the slight curiosity she had at first shown in the passing scenery had vanished. Peter let himself relax; the first motion of the car had made him feel faintly ill, but now he let himself drift with it, tried to enclose the oblique movements of the machine in his body and, lax now, felt that he had partially succeeded. It was not a good car, an old one—it was what he had been able to afford—and it quivered mercilessly and, after a full stop, shuddered alarmingly climbing into the gears. He ought to have got a new car long ago, but there hadn’t seemed a real need and, of course, there was the question of money. Even now, he didn’t know what the need for the car was. He had no notion where they were headed, except that the direction was easterly, out of the mountains. He didn’t even know whether Mina had planned a definite destination. She was perfectly capable of truly aimless movement, he thought, but then he knew the thought was false. Even if there was no destination, her moving would never be purposeless; all her energies were bent to a single purpose, she never swerved. This he had observed again and again—and a lot of good his observation was. What this purpose was he had never fathomed, so that all her actions were mysterious and sometimes seemed almost crazy; but he didn’t doubt that there was a single principle which would bring it all to him clear if he once could grasp it. These thoughts made him restless and he shifted his feet on the floorboard, feeling for the solid presence of the pump handle. He touched it with his toe and was grateful and comforted. He glanced down at it, permitted himself a faint smile in the roaring windstream. He planned to take care of the weapon, to polish it till it gleamed, and then—and then a light oil bath to prevent its rusting again. He pondered. And perhaps too, a rubber grip for it; he would need only a few inches from a rubber garden hose.…
He felt that he really ought to know Mina’s purpose: it seemed so closely dependent on Peter himself. There was a reason, yes, why he had been subjected to what he had. The idea of punishment formed in his mind, but the idea of the crime for which he was being punished would not come. It was not murder—ah, that was a mere word to him now; the memory of Sheila herself had disappeared, to leave only an impression of bright sheeny light, no person at all—no, not murder, but something more terrifying, something previous to anything he could ever remember, previous, he sometimes thought, maybe to his whole life, previous to his birth.
Regular monotony of the passing telephone poles, dark, spearlike. The shadows slipped through the interior of the car like spears. Now racing the candescent threads of railway track which lay along the road. He could follow the progress of the stretched sha
pe of the sun as it zipped on the iron. Impression of heatless light. And then they caught up with the train, passed the red caboose, went exhilaratingly by the rollicking freight cars. He heard them bounding along the track. Rocker unrocker rocker unrocker. Passed the diesel engine which let go with its ugly sour horn. Shot through narrow concrete bridges. Up and breathtakingly down dark wooded hills. Coke Rymer was taking the secondary highways; Mina must have asked him to keep off the broad fast interstate system. Again Peter couldn’t guess her reasoning; it was no less public the way they were going. Cars came toward them and slipped by, momentary as a wink. Trucks loaded with heavy paper bags of fertilizer lumbered along before them, and Coke Rymer cursed, slowing suddenly; Peter was always certain they would bang into the trucks. He cowered inside himself; imagined smothering under a flood of smelly fertilizer.
They rode on and on. Occasionally they would pull into a nondescript service station for gas, or Coke Rymer would say, “I got to go to the little boy’s room,” or “I got to powder my nose.” His coy silliness, something always grim about it. Mina would go into the station and return, bringing Peter a soft drink and cheese crackers with peanut butter. The cellophane packages were always dusty, he wiped his fingers on his trousers. But he ate and drank dutifully. Four empty soft-drink bottles rolled clinking together on the floor. In one station Peter went to the restroom, and there, in the acrid odor of the disinfectant, looked out the window before him, a narrow slot in the white concrete block wall, and thought absurdly of escape. But there was nothing to escape from. He was not a prisoner, not held by force. He was simply bound to Mina wholly; he was his own prisoner, he could escape by dying, by no other way. He uttered an involuntary sob, zipped his fly, lurched out. The sunlight struck his eyes like a slap.
It got later, the sun was behind them. The eastern sky was orange, wild with queer cloud shapes. Still they went on. The land got flatter, and towns were glimpsed before they were arrived at, the lights making ghostly white aureoles on the horizon. The young men were out, dolled up, restlessly courting the girls. Gay convertibles; shaggy fox tails pendent from radio aerials. One little town like the others, all flat on the landscape like stamps pasted in an album. Sharp brick buildings in the evening light; they looked like biscuits set out of the oven to cool. And yet it all fitted. The landscape was perfectly integral. Across the slim horizontal rows of cotton or cane, the weathered vertical form of the farmhouse seemed truly correct: its gabled porches, its uprightness, its bony angularity. On the whole land a somnolent watchfulness, a waiting for the night, for coolness, for the justice of stars. They passed drive-in movies, and the great flat faces of strangers fluttered away in the darkness; they were quickly oppressive, these visions of bright love and violence, a tipsy staggered glimpse of the secret heart of the land. Peter felt conspicuous and embarrassed at seeing the great screens; it was like peeking into bathroom windows.
It had begun to cool, but he still felt hot. His body was gritty with dust, filmed over with evaporated sweat. The oncoming headlights burned his eyes, scraped on his exacerbated nerves. They kept driving on and on, and he wanted to cry out for them to stop it, to stop it: they were going nowhere, there was nowhere to go. Why couldn’t they let up? Why was it so necessary to squash oneself to a handy ball and keep torturing it along over the flimsy landscape? He leaned and picked up the comforting pump handle and held it tightly across his lap. He gripped it hard, not to let go, and the tightness began to seep out of his chest. He ran his finger along the clear curve of the metal; it was he, this weapon; he could punch holes in the world, he possessed heroism kept carefully in check. He settled his head back against the seat. His eyelids flickered. He dozed resistlessly, still gently fingering the pump handle.
In the sharp restive dream he was a spider; no, a daddy longlegs. He scoured in jagged lines over the fields, searching out water with an unerring hunger. His size was protean; grew monstrously; diminished. On the skin of the great water, when he found it, he would drift in coolness, the big overhanging leaves of the weeping willow would keep away the sunlight. The soft fields were singing softly. In the harsh embittering dream was a peaceful dream, of waters shot with healthy shadows, of the rounded spaces under trees enclosing as with cool arms. But in the heated fields his six-legged unstable body was painful, crazy. All his eyes had nowhere to look; a glazed glare held his vision with unbreakable force. He moved crookedly; he did not want to move. There was no reason for it, there was no purpose in it. The six-legged machine was its own volition, and he a prisoner trapped. It came to him that this at last was the true image of his sickness, and in his sleep he was somewhat mollified. The sweat ceased to trickle down his sides from his armpits and his grip on the pump handle gentled.
“All right, honey, you can climb out of there. You’ve got the place we’re looking for.”
He was awake immediately. They had stopped. Coke Rymer tugged at his shoulder through the open window. He didn’t know where they were. It was full dark and cool. All round the car were trees, sibilant in the night breeze. He clambered out, stiff and dizzy, and raised his head to look at the sky. Random stars pierced the foliage, and the tree limbs moved now to sweep them from sight. He flexed his arms, held them out straight, rotated his neck on his shoulders. He breathed deep, grateful, but when he walked forward he staggered, the stiffness still in his legs.
Mina was leaning against the front fender, resting easily. Nothing bothered her; she knew where they were, why they were here. “I hope you had a good nap,” she said. “That might be what you’re good for, you know it? Just to sleep. You might could get to be a real expert.”
He turned away from her, scratched the small of his back with both hands.
“Or you could drink liquor,” she said. “I forgot about that. There’s two things you can do, right there.”
He wandered away from the car, heading ignorantly into the darkness.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Mina said.
“I’ll be back in just a few seconds,” he said.
“He’s going off to take a leak,” Coke Rymer said. “Do you want me to go with you, honey? To hold your hand?”
It was dark and cool, and he began to feel better, not so heavy. His body was still sticky with travel, and as he stood to urinate he listened hopefully for the sound of a stream nearby, water to slice away some of the road dust. No sound of water, but a sound, the night breeze hazing the foliage, like water; and even this seemed to help, to refresh. There…Now he did feel refreshed, and as he walked back toward the car he permitted himself a vague half-smile, thinking, 1 woke and found that life was duty.
They were waiting, still standing by the car. “We’re going to sleep in the back. You can sleep up in the front, if you want to,” Coke Rymer said. “The steering wheel gets in the way, that’s why.”
“All right.”
“Or if you want to, you can sleep out here on the cold ground. I don’t give a damn what you do.”
“All right,” he said.
His acquiescence robbed Coke Rymer of anything to say. He stood uncertainly. “Well…”
“Oh goddammit, come on,” Mina said. She caught the blank boy by the arm and opened the car door and propelled him into the back. “If it was up to you-all, I guess you’d just stand around talking all night. There’s better things to do than that.” She turned. “Why don’t you just take another nice little walk? I don’t reckon they’s anything around here to eat you up. So all you have to do is just not to get lost. You can take a little walk and watch out where you’re going.” She got in and closed the door.
He didn’t feel that a nice little walk was what he needed, he was tired. But he’d better go. He put his hands in his pockets and started away, heavily desiring alcohol. How much easier the trip would be if there were something to drink. Mina would know that, and yet she had allowed him nothing.…He tried to put it out of his mind, but his resolve simply made it all the worse; hi
s very neurons seemed to cry out for the stuff. The breeze had not abated and now it was cooler than he wanted. He hunched his shoulders forward. He walked aimlessly, noticing nothing about him. Now and again he looked up, walking on, and the stars seemed to float backward over the various shapes of the trees. He kept wondering if he had come far enough, if he had been gone from the car long enough to satisfy Mina. Finally he turned back and began to retrace his path. It wasn’t difficult here; the undergrowth was sparse, the trees were mostly large and well spaced. Two or three times he wandered off the track and had to extricate himself from patches of bush and briar.
But there was no real trouble, and he got back too soon. He came to the edge of the little clearing where the car sat and there he stopped, hearing Coke Rymer’s choked muttering from the back seat. He let himself clumsily to the ground and sat with his legs crossed, listening. Again he let himself smile, irony without joy; and he waited. The low whistling intake of breath he heard, the unnerving muttering: all the cruel mechanics of the lovelessness of the deed. He waited knowingly, certain of what would come. And he heard it: Coke Rymer’s anguished last outcry, uttered twice and enveloped in the breezy darkness. Coke too was under the pain of it. Snap. O, her cold cold teeth, the fishy breath of her. It was unremitting and continual; she was relentless. He smiled with solid satisfaction for the first time in a long while. She had no mercy, none. Now it wouldn’t be very long before Coke Rymer was like Peter, not male; he wouldn’t be able to fuck any more. He would be broken, a figure paper thin. … Abruptly he hankered after his pump handle. He should have brought it with him, he felt frightened without it. It was his weapon, and if anyone ever needed a weapon, it was he, for surely there had never been anyone so utterly defenseless, so helpless and so caught in incomprehensible dangerous toils. The land and sky looked upon his helplessness.